Riccardo Muti Conductor Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti

Program ONe huNdred TweNTy-FirST SeASON Chicago Symphony orchestra riccardo muti Music director Pierre Boulez helen regenstein Conductor emeritus Yo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Thursday, October 6, 2011, at 8:00 Friday, October 7, 2011, at 1:30 Saturday, October 8, 2011, at 8:30 riccardo muti conductor gerhard oppitz piano Sinigaglia Overture to Le baruffe chiozzotte, Op. 32 mendelssohn Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90 (Italian) Allegro vivace Andante con moto Con moto moderato Saltarello: Presto IntermISSIon martucci Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 66 Allegro giusto Larghetto Finale: Allegro con spirito GerhArd OPPiTz Busoni Berceuse élégiaque Bossi Intermezzi Goldoniani, Op. 127 Preludio e Minuetto Gagliarda Serenatina Burlesca Thursday evening’s concert is supported in part through the generosity of the Julius N. Frankel Foundation. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. CommentS By PhiLLiP huSCher mahler’s Last Concert to honor the CentenarY of guStav mahLer’S death, rICC ardo mutI and the ChIC ago SYmPhonY Perform the LaSt Program mahLer ConduCted n Tuesday, February 21, 1911, Gustav Mahler ignored his Odoctor’s advice to cancel that evening’s “Italian” program with the New York Philharmonic, wrapped himself in thick wool clothing, and set out with his wife Alma from the Savoy Hotel to nearby Carnegie Hall. He had led the previous day’s rehearsal with a sore throat and a high fever. The players later remembered only that he cut the rehearsal short, saying that they weren’t really ready, but that he didn’t want to keep them too long. He and Ferruccio Busoni, the celebrated Italian pianist and composer, had dined together that evening, and Mahler appeared to be in high spirits. “I have found,” he said over dinner, “that people in general are better than one supposes.” When another dinner guest, an American woman, inter- rupted to say, “You are an optimist,” Mahler shot back: “And more stupid.” The concert on Tuesday evening was one in a series that Mahler, in his second season as the orchestra’s music director, had planned to showcase national schools of music. The origi- nal scheme for this one was to include music by living Italian composers, even though, as Mahler himself noted, they tended to concentrate on writing for the opera house rather than the concert hall. Mahler settled on a program, but once he and the orchestra played through the symphony he had picked by Giovanni Sgambati (unknown to us today, but once champi- oned by both Liszt and Wagner), he decided to replace it with Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, the most famous “Italian” piece of orchestral music by a non-Italian—and one that was, of course, already in the orchestra’s repertoire. Mahler had hoped to include music by his friend Alfredo Casella, but the 2 scores didn’t arrive in time. The program Mahler conducted on February 21 began with Sinigaglia’s overture inspired by Goldoni’s Le baruffe chiozzotte and ended with Bossi’s Intermezzi Goldoniani for strings—two musical responses to the work of Carlo Goldoni, the eighteenth-century Venetian playwright. In between came a substantial piano concerto by Neapolitan composer Giuseppe Martucci (who had unfortu- nately recently died), the world premiere of a piece by Busoni, and the Mendelssohn symphony. It was something of a spe- cialist’s program, and the house wasn’t full that night, but the most celebrated Italian musician of the age, Arturo Toscanini, was present, sharing a box with Busoni. As it turned out, this concert—the same program that the Chicago Symphony performs this week—was Mahler’s last public appearance. Returning to this program today, in the year that marks the centenary of Mahler’s death—a year when Mahler’s music itself is the inevitable focus of much attention here in Chicago and around the world—reminds us that Mahler was not only a visionary composer, but also an important and influential conductor as well, and that he was a musician who was genuinely interested in his fellow composers and in a surprisingly broad spectrum of contemporary music. (Mahler purists tend to forget that his excitement on reading through the score of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana when it was sent to him in 1890, only weeks after the premiere, was so great that he decided to produce it at once.) The February 21 concert began well, but during intermission, Mahler seemed exhausted and complained of a headache. Nonetheless, he returned to the stage for the second half without hesitation. Back at his hotel after the concert, he joked about conducting himself back to health (his doctor, who met him there, said his temperature had returned to normal). But when his fever spiked before the afternoon repeat of the Italian program on the twenty-fourth, he called the concertmaster to his hotel and asked him to take over the concert (Busoni agreed to conduct his own piece). “Not one word of regret has fallen about Mahler’s absence!!,” Busoni wrote to his wife after the press made a fuss over the last-minute stand-in sensation at 3 The program page for the last concert Mahler ever conducted, February 21, 1911 4 the second performance. “One reads of such things happening in history, but when it is a personal experience, one is filled with despair.” Over the next few days, Mahler agreed to rehearse the orchestra sev- eral times and then canceled at the last minute. He was confined to his hotel room; specialists were consulted. Although it was rumored that Mahler simply had the flu, in fact, the heart condition that had first been diagnosed in 1907 was now worsening quickly. One of the last official portraits The Evening Post reported on March taken of Mahler. New York, 1911 8 that Mahler would return to the podium on the tenth, but Mahler knew better. On March 15, he wrote a confidential note to the orchestra committee, requesting the balance of his salary after subtracting fees for the concerts he missed. He clearly under- stood that his situation was hopeless. (For a few days, he said repeatedly that all sketches for his unfinished Tenth Symphony should be destroyed once he was dead.) Privately, talk of his successor as music director had already begun. “I did not know how great the danger was,” Alma Mahler later wrote of her husband’s last weeks. “If I had, I could never have got through the next three months.” Mahler was not one to give in easily, and he eventually suggested consulting with some of Europe’s finest doctors. Alma, realizing that they needed to leave New York, began to pack, quietly filling the more than forty trunks and suitcases the family brought with them. On April 8, the Mahlers left their hotel to board the Amerika, the same ship that had brought them to the U.S. in 1908. (A stretcher was sent to the hotel, but Mahler refused to use it.) The crossing took nine days. Mahler would not see anyone, not even Busoni, who by coincidence was booked on the same ship. (Busoni sent him bottles of wine and silly counterpoint exercises for amusement.) “The Germans are a funny lot,” Busoni told Alma as they walked together on deck 5 while Mahler slept, “They never under- stand people when they are still alive. Even now they have denied Mahler the stamp of genius.” When the ship stopped in Cherbourg, France, on the eve of Easter Sunday, the Mahlers were allowed to disembark before the oth- ers. One fellow passenger, the young Stefan Zweig, who would eventually become one of the most widely read writers in the world, spotted the dying composer perched on a deck chair, covered by a blanket, and nearly hidden behind his luggage: “Unforgettable . was the last time I saw him,” Zweig later wrote, “because Mahler on board ship making his I had never sensed so deeply the heroic final crossing from New York to in a man.” From Cherbourg, the Europe. April 8, 1911 Mahlers went first to Paris by train to consult with specialists, and later on to Vienna, where Gustav died at home in his bed at 11:05 on the evening of May 18. “I shall never forget his dying hours,” Alma later wrote. “His genuine struggle for eternal values, his ability to rise above everyday matters, and his unflinching devotion to truth are an example of a saintly existence.” This week’s program, replicating Mahler’s last concert, reminds us that although his music was far ahead of its time, Mahler himself was very much in touch with the music of his own day. 6 Leone Sinigaglia Born August 14, 1868, Turin, Italy. Died May 16, 1944, Turin, Italy. overture to Le baruffe chiozzotte, op. 32 he concert began well with a played it when Mahler picked it Tdelicious overture by Sinigaglia, for his Italian program—but it has one of the few modern Italians disappeared from the concert hall who has written any music for today. Le baruffe chiozzotte—a loose symphony orchestra,” The New translation might be “The quar- York Times critic wrote of Mahler’s rels of the people of Chiozza”—is Italian program on February 21, a comedy by Carlo Goldoni set 1911. The symphonic direction in the fishing village of Chiozza of Sinigaglia’s career was cer- (Chioggia, as it is known today), tainly encouraged by his move which is located on a small island from Turin to Vienna in 1894, at the southern end of the Venice where he studied with Eusebius lagoon.

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